At Thrive Yoga's recent Rumbaugh workshop, I had my mat next to a special yogini. I never caught her name. She was hearing impaired and she had brought a sign language interpreter with her. Dave and Susan gave them plenty of room in the corner of the studio (actually, my favorite turf for taking pictures, which is why I ended up next to her). The interpreter frequently stood off to one side signing Desirée's lecture and demos. During the routines, she was sat or stood near the woman and passed on the instructions.
I got a chance to partner with her when we were doing handstands in the inversion session. She was able to get up fine, and I goofed up a couple of times with the support. I also did not know the sign that she gave to let me know that she wanted to come down. I let her get out of having to support me for the hand stand, in part because she could never have supported my weight. I could see that she had a very good personal practice and she was capable of absorbing everything that Desirée was offering.
After the session was over, the woman and her interpreter approached Desirée and had a conversation. There are some obvious obstacles between a hearing-impaired yogi and an instructor because hearing is so important in cuing through a practice. In the workshop's case, this was not even a standard class, but an extended demo/lecture/try-it-yourself format. I am pretty sure that the woman did not know exactly what to expect. Plus, Anusara has its own specific terminology for how a posture is put together and an interpreter would have to be familiar with it to translate that language into appropriate signs. At one point during the session, I was tempted to grab one of Desirée's associates and ask them to actually help the hearing-impaired yogini get a clear idea of what Desirée was asking of us by actually laying hands on her and rotate muscles in spiral directions.
I had been meaning to blog about this encounter on the mats with the hearing impaired, but I forgot about it until I came across a tweet from the Deaf Yoga Foundation, based in New York City. It's main mandates are preparing a yoga sign dictionary, teacher training, and community outreach. The dictionary is interesting because it is drawing on hand gestures in Indian (Hindu) dance. Check out Dancing for the Gods.
Labels: workshop, yoga_resource
I need to put up this news item before it gets stale or overcome by events: Sharon Gannon and David Life, the co-founders of Jivamukti, return to the DC area from March 27-28 at Flow Yoga Center, they'll lead four amazing workshops incorporating all the elements of Jivamukti yoga: asana (postures), pranayama (breathing exercises), chanting, meditation, scripture, and spiritual insights. They alternate leading the sessions. This workshop series is for those practitioners who want to remake their lives along radically different lines. Debra Perlson-Mishalove, the Flow Yoga Center owner, will probably have to go outside her studio to hold this event. Otherwise, there's not going to be enough room. In any case, you definitely want to register early in order to guarantee your slot.
Correction: in the blog entry's comment, Debra provides more information about the locale for the workshops, the Franciscan Monastery at Catholic University, which opens up for 175 participants. She expects those spaces to sell out within a week, so the call to action still stands.
I am unable to write any comments about the Desirée Rumbaugh workshop; just no time to string together more than a few lines. I have posted more photographs on the Thrive Facebook gallery. I was trying to take shots without a flash, relying on opening my lens as wide as possible. The more settings and options you have, the more likely you'll forget something or just get it wrong. Plus people are moving, which may complicate things with slow shutter speeds. In other words, I am saying that there's a high failure rate in these photographs. I might be able to rescue some of them with Photoshop, but it's a steep learning curve.
This weekend I am participating in the Desirée Rumbaugh's "Heart Stimulus Plan" workshop at Thrive Yoga as resident photographer and yogi pretender. Four two and a half hour sessions. Thankfully, we had MLK's birthday holiday on Monday so I will have a day to recover from this excess. Tonight, it was a sizeable class, but there was still room to spare. I've heard that there are still spaces available for the other sessions.
Tonight we worked on hip-openers and inversions: inversions were stuffed into the last 20 minutes (not a complaint), and Desiree really led us through a series of demos and highly focused postures that gradually led us deeper and deeper into the contradictions of how to spread your sit bones. This was not a vinyasa flow class with sequencing to work up a sweat and work the whole body (as with the Brian Kest workshop in October.) No, Desirée had us apply "shins forward and hugging to the midline, thighs back and spiraling inward, hips scooped to support the core and spine." Anyone who has taken an Anusara class knows the alignment principles that are repeated over and over again. If you confront this vocabulary for the first time, you're baffled, but Desirée does a good job of wittily describing and joyously demoing how the principles are applied in poses.
- July 2008 workshop at Thrive and more comments
- Tale of my knee injury coming out of the workshop
At the end of the class, I sat crosslegged in Easy Pose (Sukhasana) on my mat. In the past, my right hip was always so tight that my knee would jut up at a 45 degree angle. More recently, my left hip had actually opened up substantially and came close to resting on the ground ("cheating" with a blanket under my hips). Tonight both hips were open and I could rest both legs on the ground. Even though I was protecting of my right knee like crazy, not pushing it too far, pulling back from the edge, that's progress. Maybe I should not give up all hope of one day doing Lotus (Padmasana)
The danger with Desirée is that she is so inspired and energetic that you want to follow her off the deep end, take a pose to the next level and compete with your neighbor as to who can get deeper in a split (not me). Desiree warned us that we need to protect ourselves with the right tools and techniques.
Well, I have two sessions tomorrow so I should to bed. I need sleep.
Labels: hips, inversions, Rumbaugh, workshop
I am looking forward to my yoga over the next month. I have extended use-it-or lose-it vacation time between now and the end of the year so I will not be restricted to the availability of yoga in the evening at Thrive. I can pick my classes throughout the day (at least, when I am not being called into the office to finish off last-minute essential work). Although Christmas and New Years wipe out two days, and other days have reduced schedules, I can still fit in a session, almost every day.
What's been frustrating is that since the Brian Kest workshop, I have not had an opportunity to build up momentum in my practice. My brother's funeral, a week-long business trip and the weeks preparing for it, my daughter's move back home and upheaval in the household, working late, family matters, Christmas parties and receptions at work, the Metro Red Line making it unpredictable as to when I'll get home, have all contorted my yoga routine into fits and starts. At most, I manage to get in three sessions a week, not enough to allow me to get into a rhythm.
I have not been disciplined enough to have a home practice. At most, I fit in some meditation, perhaps, some pranayama. It's those days away from class when my body backslides: any extra range of movement is shrunken by disuse, any skill at swinging into handstand does not set into the muscle memory. A home practice does not have to be elaborate. I could work one theme, say, hamstrings, and focus on that for a week. I know I have areas that need systematic work over time to show a breakthrough -- the back, shoulders, hips.
Another intention is to keep it simple. I've been steering myself to exclusively vinyasa 2-3 classes, except for Susan Bowen's Saturday morning class. I usually take Marylou McNamara's Hatha yoga classes. Lisa Johnson's classes are along the same line. I've taken Dana Cohen's vinyasa flow all levels on Tuesday, and she has fairly accessible style that does not demand master skill levels. I also took her yin yoga workshop and it required a lot of discipline and mental stamina.
So What's my point? I am trying to keep my practice simple. I don't want to overreach or impose my A-type yoga personality and sets goals and targets that may keep me striving for excellence, but not be aware of what other rewards yoga can give me. I keep telling myself: relax and don't work so hard; it's the ease and grace of the practice that will carry me the farthest.
Oh yeah! And Desirée Rumbaugh is coming back to Thrive Yoga on January 15-17 for a weekend workshop: The Heart Stimulus Plan (four sessions of 2-2.5 hours). The last time I took her workshop, I really muscled my way through many new poses -- and tore the meniscus in my right knee. So I want to be ready this time, with healthy knees, a body that shifted into a gear appropriate (building on conditioning, strength, strong fundamentals, all guided by mindfulness) for the workshop, and the right attitude. So I have four weeks to prepare myself for the challenge, and much better chances of accomplishing than with the Kest workshop due to personal issues.
At the Brian Kest workshop at Thrive Yoga a month ago, I took it upon myself to be the official photographer of the event. I took my Nixon D40 and kept it near my mat. A couple of times a session, I got up and took some photos, as many as I could because so many uncontrollable factors (and my own incompetence) can cross up a photo. You can see a selection of the shots at the Thrive Yoga Facebook photo gallery
Kest was cool with the distraction of a flash and shutter going off. Susan told the people that if they objected to any of their photos that showed up on Facebook, they could drop her an e-mail and we would remove it. I made a point of taking lots of shots of student greeting Kest after class. Several people specifically requested photos as mementos. Saturday class was more packed and it was really hard to move around. For the workshop weekend, I positioned my mat in a spot in the corner that allowed me a little more leeway because it was "leftover space" -- no one could fit another mat in there. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, it became so hot and humid that the lens started fogging up and everything took on a halo-like glow. I caught it on Sunday and could wipe it clean with a towel, but I was afraid that I would scratch the lens.
There were times when I did not feel comfortable taking pix. For instance, during the Long, Slow and Deep (LSD, get it!) session on Saturday afternoon. People were really zoned into their experience. Besides, by the time, we had actually tunneled into the sequence and deep restorative poses, I didn't know if I could get up. And if I got up, whether I would be able to get back down again and in the same mind and body set. I decided that meditative sets were off base (well, the whole practice is meditative, but you know what I mean).
I don't have any other lenses so I had no way to get around the limited anlges and focus depth. Susan had commented that I tend to show panoramic views of the whole (really a large segment of) class. I tried to focus in on individuals or smaller groups. As evident in this blog, I am working on a series of photos that concentrate on isolated shots, a hand, a foot, clasped hands in a bind. Rather than looking at the whole pose and the full practitioner, I am focusing on a small slice of practice -- a kind of drishti.
There is this obsessive idea of the perfect pose in much of the Western practice of yoga, that you have to get the alignment just right, find your edge with ease and grace. So we want to see lanky models pose with perfect lighting. That's why I like the isolation shots because there is no presumption of perfection. The foot of a novice on the mat is just as eloquent as the foot of a master. It tells a lot of things. My daughter, for instance, saw a picture of a foot and hand on a mat and immediately noted that the ball of the foot was slightly raised, putting more weight on the outer edge of the foot. In yoga, you're supposed to distribute the weight over all "four corners" of the foot.
I find myself really draw to this subject matter. In part, I am grappling with words to describe the experience and frequently coming up short. Photography offers another approach, more spontaneous, direct, succinct. But you're only working with the surface, which is only the first layer of the senses.
Taking pictures is a great excuse for stopping in the middle of a demanding vinyasa and taking a breather. It was a demanding practice so I welcomed the opportunity to get out of more hard stuff. I also welcomed the chance to get around and look at other people's practices more closely. It was enriching to see the diversity of experience and ease on display.
I've been meaning to mention that Kino MacGregor, an extraordinary Ashtanga instructor, will be teaching at Woodley Park Yoga on December 12-13, but I just checked at all four sessions are sold out. Unless Faith Scimecca, the studio owner, gets a bigger venue for the event, we're out of luck. We'll just have to conform ourselves to this video.
This past weekend, I participated in the multiple-session workshop of Brian Kest at Thrive Yoga. I had made a commitment to Susan Bowen, the studio owner, that I would take photos of the sessions, and I was really looking forward to the event. As it turned out, my brother died on the eve of the workshop. Since the funeral was not until the following Friday, I decided to attend. As I told Susan when I showed up on Friday evening, I wanted to celebrate my brother's life on the mat, just as I have included him as my yoga intention for the year.
In a way, the physical demands of the Kest workshop were just what I needed. The need to reach beyond my normal edge in my yoga practice meant that my body's messages overwhelmed the emotional pain of my grief. I had no time to dwell on his death, and when I got home, I had no problem sleeping. Yesterday, I felt so drained and fatigued that I did not go into work, and today, I am dragging again, but I believe it's more because of my grief and pain from my brother's death. Last night I could not get to sleep until 4 am.
Because of these considerations, I have not had a chance to comment on the workshop itself. It was just too difficult to focus on putting ideas down on paper. I don't think I can do more now than jot down some initial ideas and then come back later with something more substantive. Kest leads a physically demanding yoga practice, based on Ashtanga yoga but evolved over 30 years of his own experience. Susan had to wait a full 18-months before she could book a date for him, and we had many people from outside the Thrive Yoga community coming in for the workshop, some as far away as Florida. Many of the participants were repeats, either having taken a class, workshop or retreat previously. His most memorable line was "Some people bring their shit to yoga, and turn yoga into shit."
Photo: Desiree Rumbaugh in handstand
National Yoga Month is September around the country, and there will be Global Mala events all around the DC area, plus workshops by high-profile teachers. Many events will revolve around doing 108 sun salutations or other permutations as an offering or garland.
- Inner Reaches (Gathersburg) is offering a "108-minutes of yoga" session on September 20. It's 12-5, but the yoga starts are 2:00 pm. This flyer has more details or go to the website.
- Amy Weintraub will give a workshop on her LifeForce Yoga at Circle Yoga on September 11.
- Yoga Aid will be staging a two-hour event in downtown DC, starting at 10:00 am on September 12.
- As you might expect, Lucy stores will be sponsoring multiple events. Check with the local story.
- Faith Hunter will lead a session at Shakti MindBody Studio on September 6.
Yoga Month is sponsoring a one-week of free yoga promotion at participating studios. It's a great chance to sample a different studio. Other events will be coming up, and I'll try to point to them here, if possible, but you can also check with your home yoga studio to see what's happening there.
I did not go into the workshop with Desiree Rumbaugh with any special expectations, aside from that of knowing that an excellent instructor would be guiding the process and a group of yogis would energize the environment. I saw the occasion as a mid-term evaluation about how my practice has been maturing since my last workshop. I wanted to see how the work invested on the mat has paid off. So I pick up where I left off yesterday.
Thrive Yoga's Dave Bowen gets a taste of Desiree's adjustment of wheel pose.
Fourth Finding: The day after the workshop was over, I felt really fatigued, my whole body burnt out. I pampered myself and did not try to do any yoga or exercise except for my walks to and from the Metro, a couple of miles. I felt sore as if I'd really gone through an extreme physical ordeal. I was especially sore and stiff in my hips and shoulders, thighs and arms. Curiously, my knees hurts when I walked, as if I might be a risk of tweaking a tendon. Throughout the weekend, I had been probing my edges and it was natural that my body should feel the strain. At my age (two months short of 59), the energy reserves are shallower, the recovery capacity is slower and the need for healing is more pronounced. But it took me a while to realize that this sensation is really a kind of muscle memory of all the poses that I did and the new edges established. I stop, focus in on my aches and pains, and sense what muscles involved, and then I feel myself drawn into alignment and something lights up inside me.
Desiree stands back in awe, watching Christine Peterson
(you can tell she's a Forest Yoga buff because she uses gloves)
settle into Diving Osprey pose.
Fifth Finding: yoga is an experimental, experiential science. It is a sophisticated universe of knowledge about the body, mind, spirit, energy and their complex interrelation, which has been accumulated, filtered, refined, and aged over millenia. But the application of this knowledge system on the body and mind is left to the individual practitioner. Desiree said that you can tell when a yogi is advanced because they take their time getting into poses. It almost looks as if they were practicing in slow motion. That's because they are observing and parsing all the information coming back from the far reaches of their limbs with scientific rigor: how do the muscles feel, have they reached their edge, is there a risk in pushing beyond the edge, do I feel at ease, can I dwell in stillness in the pose, how can I get out of this knot, what emotions and energies are released by this pose, what am I revealing about my mind or spirit in this vulnerable pose and so on. A beginner will zip through the vinyasa, and in and out of poses, as if he/she is sprinting to a finish line. The intermediate yogis are the ones who get themselves injured, Desiree pointed out, because they are pushing recklessly beyond what is physically safe and worth the risk for the practice. She admitted that she was guilty of this excess in her early years, and her current skills at practicing advanced poses and assisting others to learn yoga were acquired through painful mistakes and the need to heal and avert them in the future. She got really amped up when people started asking questions or giving insights that showed that they were paying attention to the details. The workshop drew a pretty experienced crowd of yogis, but we went over the details of the poses as if we were all beginners.
Thrive Yoga's Lisa Johnson turns inward in Eight-Angle pose (Astavakrasana).
Sixth Finding: Anusara yoga practitioners have their opening invocation "Om namah shivaya gurave..." that starts each session, and then there's the mantra that they repeat for every pose: "Shins press towards the mid-line, thighs spiral in and back, the sit bones widen, the tail bone tucks into the space made by the blossoming of the hips..." The Universal Principles of Alignment are the guidelines that John Friend laid down to unify all the yoga practices and poses across multiple lineages and traditions. Desiree repeated the instructions over and over again, and then came back to them, again and again. But I never found this repetitious or boring. Even though the instructions are similar, each pose opens a different gateway into the body. And since your body is changing in the process, each time you approach a pose, the experience is going to be unique. You can be practicing mountain pose or a complicated arm balance, and the same attitude and approach apply.
The reward of sweat
Seventh Finding: at any time during the workshop, I'd look up and see yogis and yoginis, teachers and students doing their stuff, and all of them were bumping into what seemed to be their own bodies'limits. Desiree would come up and apply pressure with a hand or knee on a specific area and show that it was merely a false floor, that there was space beyond that faux boundary. Desiree was asked about the ideas of some yoga teachers, like Paul Grilley, who make a point of highlighting the anatomical limits that exist in all people, and may be quite different, the conclusion being that you should not ask students to go beyond their physical limits. Desiree said, however, that Anusara celebrates freedom of yoga (as opposed to anatomical limits) and that each individual should assume ownership of his or her own body and take it as far as they can.
Labels: blessing, core, hips, milestone, shoulders, workshop
Desiree Rumbaugh
Anusara Yoga teacher
I wanted to sketch out some ideas about the Desiree Rumbaugh workshop at Thrive Yoga this weekend. You would think that 13 hours of yoga spread over three days would generate a lot of grist for the mill, but there's been little opportunity to clarify my mind. Friday night after the first two-hour session, I was involved in family affairs (my mother-in-law arrived from New York City and daughter spent the night on her way to Philadelphia for the weekend.) until late.
Last night, I went straight home and ate anything to give me some quick energy. I thought about doing something useful, but I was too tired to write anything about the workshop. In the end, I went to bed. The next morning, I dragged myself out of bed, served myself a bagel and a cup of coffee and made it to the studio by 8:45. I wondered if I had made the right decision: my hips, thighs and calves were all stiff and felt like dead weight. I felt flat and a bit burned out. But once the yoga started moving my limbs, my energy got better. By the end of the last session (Yoga Therapy), all I could think of was to get more fuel into my system.
Kathy Donnelly, Desiree Rumbaugh, Suzie Hurley and Susan Bowen welcomeall the Anusara aficianados to the first night of the workshop.
First finding: all-day yoga workshops make it hard to get adequate meals. I did not want to overeat at breakfast and lunch for fear that it would interfere with the yoga. But all the energy consumed during the sessions means that a late dinner just makes you want to go to bed. If I had taken just one session a day, it would not have made much of a difference, but double sessions are grueling.
Second finding: Anusara yoga has a strong foothold in the DC area. Desiree drew workshop participants from as far away as New York, Pennsylvania and even California, but many current Anusara teachers from the DC area (and their students) renewed their relationship with Desiree. Lots of hugs and kisses before and after each class: Willow Street Yoga, the Yoga Center of Columbia , Inner Reaches Yoga, and probably a few others, were all present. Friday night and Saturday morning, not another mat could have fit into the expanded room (maybe 70 in all). The other sessions still had slots available, but there were a lot of new faces. That's pretty good, considering that the workshop fell in the middle of summer. Thrive's owner, Susan Bowen, says that Desiree will be back soon.
Desiree demonstrated how to get deeply into cobra pose.
Third Finding: Desiree Rumbaugh is an exceptional teacher, and it's easy to see why she's gained such a great reputation. She has a knack for driving home the Anusara message of proper alignment, joyful attitude and balanced action in asana after asana, spotting the necessary adjustments to more fully manifest the pose in her students, and enthusiastic narrative that intertwines her own self-discovery and healing through yoga and the principles of Anusara philosophy. She's really able to break pose down into pieces that can easily be digested and enacted. And it's the details that make the difference in the asana.
These "findings" are the low hanging fruit that I can easily pick before going to bed. More considered remarks will come later, with at least one good night of sleep and a day without yoga under my belt. Plus, I've got photographs of the sessions.
This coming weekend, Desiree Rumbaugh will be giving five workshops at Thrive Yoga. I hear that there are still vacancies available, though the Friday evening class looks like it's close to filling up. I will be attending all of the sessions, taking pictures as often as feasible, and sucking up the energy. Thrive Yoga is basically shutting down for the weekend to hold this workshop so it's practically Desiree or nothing. I will try to blog my practice, but I don't know what kind of time and motivation will be left over from the sessions.
Continuing with Donavan Wilson's comments on yoga classes in the DC area, he recounts three recent experiences: in a well-established studio, in a small studio operating out of loaned facilities (typical of how many studios get started), and in a store.
"Support Your Center: A Workshop on Core Strength" with Sheree Mullen, March 2008
This was my first class at Willow Street Yoga Center and it lived up to its reputation. Ms. Mullen offered an unorthodox and fun workshop that focused on postures that target the core. Sheree's approach was to try postures in a different way. A few participants fell on the floor in an effort to keep up. No one was injured. The participants ranged from beginner (one male student's first yoga class) to advanced students. Students encouraged Mullen to offer a second workshop in the future.
Gerri Smith, Calm Unity Yoga, December 2007.
Geri Smith manages Calm Unity Yoga, which offers classes a few days in the week. The "studio" is a carriage house located next to the Art Barns in the Kentlands, Gaithersburg. Calm Unity offers blankets, blocks, straps and mats for individuals. I participated in Hatha class (Saturday from 11:30 to 12:45). It was small (6 or 7 people), which provided an opportunity for the instructor to give students more one-on-one guidance. The class challenged me and it was a rewarding experience.
Lululemon Athletica in Bethesda, June 29, 2008
I went to a Sunday class at the Bethesda Lululemon Athletic, a high-end store that sells Yoga-inspired athletic apparel. It provides a free Yoga class that starts at 6. Laura Greene, who teaches at the Sacred Space Yoga in Rockville, is a wonderful instructor with a thick English accent. I enjoyed the class SO MUCH. Each week Lululemon will provide a different instructor. Lululemon's staff wants to provide a class every day! I hope they succeed.
Beryl Bender Birch, the master instructor of Hard and Soft Power Yoga (within the Ashtanga school), is giving a weekend workshop at Georgetown Yoga on Friday, June 6 and Saturday, June 7. As noted here and here before, I participated in a Bender Birch workshop at Thrive Yoga. I really enjoyed the opportunity to benefit from her insight and inspiration and would recommend her to any serious yoga student.
At Thrive Yoga, there are a couple of great workshops coming up:
- Govindas & Radha - Waves of Love Weekend on June 13-14. Govindas is a Rockville native who now lives in California and leads workshops that combine asana with kirtan, music, rhythm and joy. You can buy his CD at CD Baby. The Friday evening event is going to be a family affair in which you can bring offspring and friends for a single price.
- Anusara Yoga with Desiree Rumbaugh will take place on the July 11-13 weekend. Desiree is an exception teacher and associate of John Friend. She has multiple two DVDs that deal with body issues through yoga. These sessions are going to be 2-3 hours long so that will really reveal a lot about Anusara's approach to the body .
There is nothing like take an intensive workshop (just one session or multiple days), to break through barriers in your practice.
Andrea Franchini was my first yoga teacher at Tranquilspace and then she moved to Flow Yoga Center and I soon joined her. I introduced my daughter to Andrea and we took classes with her together. Stephanie and Andy struck some common vibes and kept in contack over time. I was really fortunately to find a teacher like Andy. She has a nurturing, therapeutic approach to yoga, typically of the Anusara tradition, so she helped put to rest a lot of my early nerves about doing yoga in a classroom setting. She's always been a kind of marker in my practice
Two years ago, Andy decided she wanted a change of scene and moved to San Francisco, but once or twice a year she comes back to Washington to give a workshop or a master class. Stephanie, Teresa and I joined her this time around at Flow Yoga. Of course, I was going in part because of the ego trip — I wanted to hear her tell my how far my practice has come in two years. For instance, I realized that I had to use a bolster under my hips and back to get into reclining hero's supta virasana pose when Andy was teaching me, and now I can get by with just a folded blanket. But that was only a sidebar in the rush of mat-focused learning that took place in those five hours. Workshops allow me to push through a lot of artificial barriers that I erect in my mind.
This Saturday-Sunday workshop was back in January and I'm just now getting around to writing about it so I am playing catch up. My yoga practice and its internal processes has pretty much overwhelmed my capacity to digest it through writing, either in a journal or a blog. Blasting off a quick entry about a news item on yoga, a website or my trip to St. Thomas is just a gesture to pacify my angst.
Susan Bowen has announced the start-up of teacher training at Thrive Yoga. ISHTA Yoga founder and pioneer, Alan Finger, will be leading the four-month process. Alan knows a lot because he was born into a yoga-inspired family, knew original thinkers and grappled with translating these concepts into the U.S. culture as a business and as a philosophy. He co-founded yoga studios, like the Yoga Works studio in LA and the Yoga Zone studios in NYC, which later became the Be Studios.
The training will start in late March, mostly on weekends, and last until June. At 2:00 on January 20 at Thrive Yoga, Alan and Susan will present an overview of the program. Alan is actually based on New York City so he will be commuting a lot next year. I might add that you can take the course without wanting to become a teacher; it's an intensive gateway into a deeper understanding of yoga.
ISHTHA is an acronym for the Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda, and also a Sanskrit word meaning that which resonates with an individual's spirit, according to Alan's website. With Katrina Repka, he wrote Chakra Yoga: Balancing Energy for Physical, Spiritual, and Mental Well-being (Shambhala, 2005), which synthesizes his long evolution as a practitioner, teacher and thinker. There are also a bunch of Yoga Zone videos available that feature Alan.
Labels: life style, philosophy, reading, workshop, yoga
You can see a historic video of Iyengar from the same period.
Labels: history, inspire, philosophy, videos, workshop
The workshop this past weekend was a milestone in my practice. I've been noticing a shift in my focus on yoga for several weeks now. I notice how incomplete I feel when I'm not able to get to class and how energized and alive I feel when I have done a good practice. When I was traveling, I made it a point to reserve an hour or two in the evenings to roll out my mat and do some work. What a glow this solitary practice gives to your body and mind as you move through the vinyasa moved only by the rhythm of your own breath! No instructor, no audio cues.
I came to yoga four years ago because I wanted to reap from its benefits — yoga for depression, anxiety, and heart aches; yoga to deal with back pain and aging; yoga for losing weight and gaining flexibility. The US market is full of this message. I still want those pluses, but I noticed that I am motivated less by the benefits and more by the practice itself. The most succinct explanation I've heard for this attitude is Shiva Rea saying that she was not interested in "doing yoga," but rather in "being yoga." That shift in focus makes a big difference. I not only get the same benefits as before, but they seem to be compounded because they are unencumbered by the resistance and tension that build up when I am specifically seeking an outcome; I become aware of other aspects of my practice that I failed to sense because I was targeting my efforts too narrowly.
In a sense, my purchase of a new mat and other paraphernalia and my participation in the workshop is a long-term investment in my yoga practice. It's not just a hobby, a pastime or a fitness exercise, but an integral part of my self-image and a tool in my personal development. I am taking a stake in the future.
And this past weekend, I celebrated my four-year anniversary by tapping into a shared energy and flow with other yogis who also realize the prospects of the discipline and rejoice in the varied stages of practices that others might bring to the mat. In other words, no novice, no expert, just yogis sharing the reward of the practice. Beryl told us that in India yoga was originally meant to be practiced in a group setting, in the neighborhood shala with other practitioners. She was so right. I was fortunate to celebrate this milestone in the studio that has been my shala for the past three years.
I wanted to put up more remarks about the workshop but I am just too tired physically and psychologically. Three days in a row of full-bore practice really depleted my energy stores and left me flat, but my muscles were not sore. At my age, energy recovery comes more slowly. I am making a point of getting to bed by 11:30 tonight. More to come later.
I've just spent three days focused on yoga with Beryl Bender Birch at a Thrive Yoga workshop. I am writing this posting on a staggered basis because I'm still putting my thoughts together about the workshop.
Beryl has been a pioneer of introducing yoga in the United States, starting nearly 35 years ago. She now operates out of the Hard and the Soft Yoga Institute on Long Island and has taught several generations of yoga instructors. She built up traction teaching yoga to athletes in New York City in the 1980s. She coined the phrase Power Yoga as a more appropriate tag for Ashtanga yoga that American could understand. She also wrote two books, Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga: 8 Levels of Practice for Body and Soul, that were among the first to reach a broader audience.
We had four 2.5 hour sessions, one Friday, two on Saturday and one on Sunday. In the second Saturday session, we did a restorative pose for 15 minutes and closed with a meditation. In between, Beryl distributed a half dozen different translations (or interpretations) of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and had us read them out loud. Then, she led us in a discussion of what yoga is, why we practice it and what we want to obtain. That was one of the traits of her teaching. In our first class before doing a jump-back or starting ujayay breath, she held up her hand with about an inch between thumb and index finger and said, "Yoga is this much about asana." The conversation was lively and informative.
For the actual practice, Beryl led us through the Ashtanga Primary Series. It was my first time following a traditional sequencing of poses, though many were modified for practitioners who had not mastered a specific pose.
I think that the appeal of a workshop is the chance to discover the alchemy of shared practice, bringing together an experienced teacher and a roomful of bodies and minds focused on getting the most out of the opportunity. 50-60 sets of lungs churning up the prana in unison -- that's some pretty powerful magic. Beryl did an excellent job of creating the right atmosphere. She always spent the first 30 minutes of a session building up a rapport with the students, giving us an idea of where she wanted to take us, letting us tap into her wisdom and getting a feel for how we could handle the work.
There were actually students who had not taken more than 10 hours of yoga before the workshop. On the other hand, several yoga instructors who had trained under Beryl also showed up for the workshop. At several points, Beryl stopped a student from doing the vinyasa and had them looked at other students as they did the practice: "You can learn as much from watching as from doing."
Beryl had a nice gesture at the end of the final session: she brought out a box full of yoga books (a few courtesy copies but most purchased with her own funds) and she gave them away to the students. Spread the wisdom!
